The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China

by Lu Xun

  To cover the costs of the Daoist priest that the Zhaos had hired to exorcize evil spirits.

  Never to set foot, ever again, over the Zhaos’ threshold.

  If any accident, of any unforeseen kind, were subsequently to befall Mrs Wu, Ah-Q, and Ah-Q alone, would be held responsible.

  To abandon all hope of recovering his wages or shirt.

  Regrettably, Ah-Q lacked the funds to make good his indemnity. But as, by happy coincidence, it was spring, he was able to do without his cotton quilt, which he pawned for two thousand coppers, enabling him to fulfil the demands of the peace treaty. After kowtowing, bare-chested, he found himself with a few coppers left over, which he chose to blow on wine rather than redeem his felt hat. The Zhaos didn’t burn the candles and incense right away, preferring to keep them for when the mistress of the house next paid her respects to the Buddha. Most of his tattered old shirt was recycled into nappies for the baby that was born to the younger mistress in the eighth month; any off-cuts were used by Mrs Wu for the soles of her shoes.

  CHAPTER 5

  Questions of Economy

  By the time Ah-Q – his dues paid – made his way back to the Temple of Earth and Grain, the sun had gone down, and he was beginning to feel a slight malaise. Eventually, it dawned on him that the root cause of it all was the absence of his shirt. Remembering that he was still in possession of a ragged cotton jacket, he draped it over his shoulders and lay down. When he next opened his eyes, the sun’s rays were beating down on the wall facing west. ‘Damn,’ he muttered to himself, sitting up.

  Once up, he set out to wander the streets, as he usually did. Although he felt no particular physical discomfort as a result of the lack of clothing on his top half, something seemed to strike him as Not Quite Right with the world. From that day on, the women of Weizhuang seemed suddenly timid of him, darting into doorways on seeing him approach. Even Mrs Zou – not far shy of fifty – would take shelter like the rest of them, pulling her ten-year-old daughter in with her. ‘Whores,’ Ah-Q mused curiously to himself. ‘Acting like Vestal Virgins all of a sudden.’

  It took a little while longer, however, for this sense of Not Quite Rightness to take firm hold. One, the tavern began to refuse him credit. Two, babbling some nonsense at him, the old caretaker in the Temple of Earth and Grain seemed to be ordering him off the premises. Three, for days now – how many exactly, he couldn’t quite say, but a good number – no one had hired him. To be refused credit in the tavern – this was something he could put up with; to be chased out of the temple – a temporary inconvenience; but when he didn’t get work, Ah-Q’s stomach bitterly complained. This, indeed, was a confounded nuisance.

  When he could stand it no longer, Ah-Q was obliged to make inquiries of his old employers – except for the Zhaos’, from whose gate he had been banned. But things seemed different now. A furious-looking man would always stalk out and tell him to get lost – as though he were a beggar.

  Most extraordinary, pondered Ah-Q. Families that until now had always been clamouring for a bit of casual labour now seemed to have nothing going. Ah-Q smelt a rat. Further careful investigation around his old employers revealed that when there was work to be done, they now called upon another individual whose name posterity has not precisely recorded but which, using a now tried-and-tested method, we will leave as D: an impoverished runt whose position in the great hierarchy of things – as Ah-Q saw it – lay somewhere below that of the hairy Wang. Never, in his worst nightmares, would Ah-Q have dreamt that this utter weed would make off with his own bowl of rice. Now this – this was cause for fury. Ah-Q stormed off, waving his fist in the air and bursting spontaneously into song, reprising a line from one of his favourite operas, The Battle of the Dragon and the Tiger:

  ‘I-I-I-I-I will thrash you with my mace, yes, I will!’

  A few days later, he at last encountered D opposite the main gate to the Qians’. Eyes gleaming with antagonistic recognition, Ah-Q advanced, with D holding his ground.

  ‘Pig!’ Ah-Q glared, spittle flying.

  ‘Or how about,’ D negotiated, ‘slug?’

  This pleasing show of modesty succeeded only in intensifying Ah-Q’s rage. Forced to improvise in the absence of a mace, he rushed forward to grab hold of D’s queue. His opponent left one hand protecting the base of the pigtail, while attacking Ah-Q’s own queue with his other. Although the old Ah-Q would not have been given an instant’s pause by the pathetic D, the recent hard times on which he had fallen had reduced him to a comparable physical state. Now pretty much a match for each other, for a good half-hour they remained locked in struggle, one hand on their own, the other assaulting the other’s queue, backs curved into a blue arch against the whitewashed front wall of the Qian household.

  ‘All right! All right!’ their audience interjected: perhaps to arbitrate; perhaps to express approval; or perhaps to stir things up a bit more.

  Yet the adversaries were as deaf to their surroundings. Ah-Q would advance three paces, and D retreat as many; standstill would be reached. Then D would retake these same three steps, this time with Ah-Q retreating; standstill again. After maybe another half-hour – as there were no striking clocks in Weizhuang, it is hard to be precise on the subject; it could have been twenty minutes – their hair was steaming, their foreheads running with sweat. At the exact instant that Ah-Q relaxed his grip, D did the same. Straightening up, both stepped back and pushed their way out of the crowd.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ Ah-Q tossed over his shoulder.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you!’ came the reply.

  There was a certain lack of clarity and closure about this particular battle between the dragon and tiger of Weizhuang. Who was victor? Who was vanquished? Was the audience satisfied with the performance? No particular opinion was expressed either way. And still no one hired Ah-Q as a labourer.

  One unusually mild day, when the breeze seemed to have the breath of summer about it, Ah-Q began to feel cold. Which he wouldn’t have minded on its own; it was the hunger he couldn’t stand. First his quilt, his felt hat and his shirt had gone; then his padded jacket – all sold. Now he was left only with his trousers – which he couldn’t let go – and his ragged cotton jacket, which nobody would want, except for making shoe soles. He dreamt of finding some money on the road, but never did; he dreamt of finding a coin or two in the dilapidated room he was living in, but a frantic search yielded nothing. He decided to go out in search of sustenance.

  He walked past familiar sights – the tavern, trays of steamed rolls – without pausing, without registering a twinge of desire for either. He was searching for something else; though what that something was, he couldn’t say.

  Weizhuang was not a big place, and soon enough he reached the end of it. The village was fringed by paddy fields busy with pale green shoots. The occasional black dot wove among them: farmers working their land. Without stopping to appreciate this pastoral idyll, Ah-Q went on; he still had some way to go, he intuited, on his quest for food. Eventually, he neared the Convent of Quiet Cultivation.

  The convent’s whitewashed walls emerged unexpectedly out of the fresh green fields that surrounded them. A vegetable garden was tucked inside the low earthen wall to the back. Ah-Q hesitated, glancing around him: there was nobody about. He then set about scaling the garden wall, hauling himself up on a bunch of knotweed. As the surface of the wall crumbled, Ah-Q’s feet began to tremble beneath him, before he managed to scramble over via an incidental mulberry tree. Though the garden within was lush with vegetation, there seemed to be no wine or steamed rolls or indeed anything else edible in sight. A copse of bamboo lined the western wall, its shoots visible at the base, but they unfortunately needed cooking first. Elsewhere, there were bolting oilseed rape, flowering mustard greens and pak-choi that was past its first flush of youth.

  Ah-Q prowled up to the garden gate, feeling a keen sense of the injustice of it all. There, however, a joyful surprise awaited him: a bed of elderly turnips. He s
quatted down and tugged at them. A round head suddenly popped up at the gate, then shrank back again: Ah-Q’s old enemy, the young nun. Even though Ah-Q had always been scrupulous never to have the slightest respect for people such as young nuns, discretion sometimes turns out to be the better part of valour and so, after uprooting four turnips as fast as he could, he twisted off their green outer leaves, and tucked them into his jacket, just in time to greet an old nun.

  ‘By the Buddha! What are you doing in our garden, Ah-Q, stealing our turnips!… Stop thief!’

  ‘Me? Stealing turnips?’ Ah-Q said, edging away.

  ‘What’s that under there, then?’ The old nun indicated the protuberance beneath his jacket.

  ‘Reckon they’re yours, do you? Do they answer if you call them? You…’

  Ah-Q broke into a run, pursued by a sizeable black dog usually stationed at the front gate; how it had found its way to the back garden was a mystery. But just as the dog’s fangs snarled inches from Ah-Q’s leg, a turnip happily fell from his jacket, giving the creature brief pause – just long enough for Ah-Q to scramble back up the mulberry tree, get a leg over the earthen wall, and hurl himself, together with the surviving turnips, to the ground beyond, leaving the black dog barking up at the tree, while the old nun chanted her prayers.

  Afraid the dog might be set loose on him, Ah-Q gathered up his trophies and set off, picking up a few small stones from the road as he went along; but the black dog made no reappearance. Discarding the stones, Ah-Q ate the turnips as he walked. There was nothing for him here, he thought; time to try his luck in town.

  In the time it took to eat three turnips, his mind was made up.

  CHAPTER 6

  Rise and Fall

  Weizhuang did not catch another glimpse of Ah-Q until just past the Mid-Autumn Festival. Remarking in surprise upon his sudden return, the villagers suddenly wondered where he had been all this time. Whenever he had taken himself off to town before, Ah-Q had been quick to mouth off about it. This time, however, he had kept curiously quiet, so no one had paid any attention. Maybe he had told the old caretaker in the temple. In any case, only trips to town undertaken by people of consequence – by Messrs Zhao or Qian, or the local genius – were public events in Weizhuang. If even the exploits of the Fake Foreign Devil failed to count as newsworthy, then what claim did Ah-Q have on the village’s notice? Maybe that was why the old man had not broadcast the news, leaving the rest of Weizhuang society in the dark.

  Yet Ah-Q seemed changed – even remarkably so – on his return from this particular trip. One evening, near nightfall, he suddenly appeared, sleepy-eyed, in the doorway to the tavern. Walking up to the bar, he pulled from his belt a fistful of silver and copper coins. ‘Wine!’ he barked, throwing them down. ‘I’m paying cash!’ He had on a new cotton jacket, his belt drooping visibly from the weight of the purse at his waist. Weizhuang lore held that cautious deference – rather than outright rudeness – was the best policy around those who acted in any way unusually. Even though everyone recognized him as Ah-Q, his possession of a new jacket meant that a reassessment was perhaps in order. Waiter, manager, drinkers and other random passers-by arranged their faces into expressions of tentative respect.

  ‘Well, Ah-Q,’ the manager began, nodding at him. ‘Long time no see!’

  ‘Reckon so.’

  ‘Made a pile, I see… in…?’

  ‘In town!’

  By the following day, the news had spread through Weizhuang like wildfire. Everyone wanted to hear about the rise of the new Ah-Q, with his new jacket and ready cash – a story that gradually leaked out in the tavern, in the teahouse and under the temple eaves, to universal gasps of admiration and respect.

  As Ah-Q told it, he had started out helping in the household of a local bigwig who had passed the provincial-level civil service examination. (An awed hush fell over his audience as this detail was revealed.) The scholar in question went by the name of Bai, but because he was the only provincial examination laureate in the entire town, no one ever needed to refer to him by his real name. For thirty miles around and about, everyone – and not just Weizhuang – thought his full name was Mr Provincial Examination. To work in the house of such a grandee was, of course, a mighty achievement in itself. But, Ah-Q told his listeners, he got fed up with being a servant, because the revered gentleman was, to state the facts simply, a pain in the damn neck. A delicious sigh of happy regret now rippled through his audience: no one had imagined for a moment that Ah-Q was worthy of working in the household of Mr Provincial Examination; and yet to throw in such a position was still a shame.

  As Ah-Q told it, he had come back because the people in town got on his nerves: with their ‘narrow benches’, and their shredded onions, and – a new failing Ah-Q had had opportunity to observe – the women’s failure to wiggle their hips properly when they walked. But the town had its points, too. The peasants of Weizhuang, for example, gambled with bits of bamboo – only the Fake Foreign Devil knew anything about ‘moh-jang’ [sic]. In town, though, even the lowest lowlife were experts at the game. Pit the Fake Foreign Devil against a ten-year-old beggar from town, and he’d be mincemeat. (At which disrespect, every listener blushed.)

  ‘Ever seen an execution?’ asked Ah-Q. ‘Now, that’s a sight. They’re always executing revolutionaries. Oh, it’s a sight, a sight…’ He shook his head excitably about, stars of spittle moistening the face of Zhao Sichen opposite. His listeners’ wonder was now edged with dread. Looking about him, Ah-Q suddenly raised his right hand then sliced it down on to the outstretched nape of a rapt hairy Wang.

  ‘Hwah!’

  The terrified Wang pulled in his neck as quick as he could, while everyone else enjoyed a pleasurable frisson of horror. For days afterwards, Wang was far from his usual self. Neither he – nor anyone else for that matter – dared go anywhere near Ah-Q.

  Although to claim that Ah-Q’s status, in the eyes of Weizhuang at large, had now risen higher than that of Mr Zhao would have been an exaggeration, we would not be overstating the case to say that the two men were now, more or less, on a level.

  Soon after, Ah-Q’s new celebrity spread to the ladies’ chambers of Weizhuang. To put this in a little perspective, there were only two serious establishments in Weizhuang – the Qians’ and the Zhaos’ – and so the great majority of the village’s boudoirs were pretty poor sorts of places. All the same, given Ah-Q’s record with women, this latest development was not far off miraculous. Whenever the local women met, they would be sure to mention that Mrs Zou had bought a blue silk skirt from Ah-Q; true, it was second-hand, but it only cost her ninety coppers. Then there was Zhao Baiyan’s mother – though some said it was Zhao Sichen’s mother; further verification required – who bought a child’s shirt of dark red muslin, barely worn, for only two hundred and seventy-six coppers. Suddenly, Ah-Q was the man of the moment: those deficient in silk skirts wanted silk skirts; those deprived of muslin shirts wanted muslin shirts. Now, not only did Weizhuang’s women stand their ground when they caught sight of him, they sometimes even called him back after he had walked off.

  ‘Any more silk skirts, Ah-Q? No? Or muslin shirts, got any of them?’

  Eventually, the news seeped into even the great boudoirs of the village. Excessively pleased with her purchase, Mrs Zou invited Mrs Zhao to admire her silk skirt, of which the latter spoke – in the most elevated terms – to Mr Zhao. On discussing the question at the dinner table with his learned son, Mr Zhao concluded that while the exercise of caution about the house would be advisable (as there was doubtless something fishy about this business with Ah-Q) he might have one or two decent things. It just so happened that their esteemed wife and mother was currently after a good fur waistcoat at a reasonable price. And so a clan resolution was passed, to the effect that Mrs Zou would be deputed at once to seek out Ah-Q, and a third exception made to the no-lamps-after-dinner rule.

  The lamps burned, and burned; still Ah-Q did not appear. Anxiety, fatigue, resentment ripple
d through the assembled Zhao clan: indignation at the skittishness of Ah-Q, impatience at the slowness of Mrs Zou. Mrs Zhao expressed concern that Ah-Q was too frightened to come, because of the events of last spring. Mr Zhao batted her worries away: this time, he had personally commanded Ah-Q’s presence. At last, fully proving that Mr Zhao could never be wrong, in came Ah-Q, behind Mrs Zou.

  ‘He keeps on saying he hasn’t anything left,’ Mrs Zou reported, rather out of breath. ‘I said he should tell you in person, but he still kept on, so I said…’

  ‘So – Mr Zhao!’ Ah-Q took up position beneath the eaves, the corners of his mouth flirting with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘We hear that life outside Weizhuang has treated you well,’ Mr Zhao walked over, sizing this new Ah-Q up. ‘That’s excellent – excellent. We’ve… also heard that you’ve picked up some second-hand things along the way… Bring them over to show us, will you… just in case…’

  ‘I already told Mrs Zou. I’ve nothing left.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Mr Zhao faltered.

  ‘It all belonged to a friend of mine, and there wasn’t much to begin with. They’ve all been sold to other people.’

  ‘There must be something left.’

  ‘Only a door curtain.’

  ‘Bring it over,’ Mrs Zhao quickly commanded.

  ‘Tomorrow will be fine,’ Mr Zhao did not sound particularly enthusiastic. ‘But next time you have anything, show us first.’

  ‘We’ll pay better than anyone else!’ said the village genius. His wife glanced across at Ah-Q, to see if this had any impact on him.

  ‘I want a fur waistcoat,’ Mrs Zhao said.

  After signalling his assent, Ah-Q slouched out so indifferently that no one could tell whether he really meant it. The whole disappointing encounter vexed Mr Zhao so much that he quite stopped yawning. His son was equally agitated by Ah-Q’s attitude: We should watch ourselves around this bastard, he warned. Maybe we should tell the constable to throw him out of Weizhuang. Mr Zhao resisted the idea, wary of making an enemy of Ah-Q. As likely as not, someone in his line of business wouldn’t shit on his own doorstep. The villagers had nothing to worry about; they just needed to take a bit more care at night. The learned son immediately submitted to the wisdom of the father, retracted his previous advocacy and exhorted Mrs Zou to say nothing, under any circumstances, of it to anyone else.